Everyone has heard for years of how fun GTA is, including myself. When I started playing story mode I had a blast messing around, but before I knew it I was hooked on the story.

The graphics don't feel old, in fact I sometimes found myself staring at the sky during sunsets, or at the bright lights of the city as I drove around at night.

The gameplay is ridiculously fun, even when playing by yourself. There was never a shortage of things to do, and many missions feature different mechanics to keep things fresh.

The writing is clever and funny, and there wasn't a single mission I found boring. The three main characters were my favorite aspect of the game, and will probably be the part that I will miss the most about playing through this for the first time.

Franklin, I feel represented the player the best. Like a person playing this game for the first time, Franklin gets slowly roped in on Michael and Trevor's business. Before he realizes it, he's become part of their crew and is reaping both the benefits and the disadvantages of the situation. My favorite aspect of Franklin was that he never forgot about his old friends, and when anyone was in danger, he'd do everything in his power to save them.

Michael is a character that took a while to grow on me. He is a mess at the start of the game, a husband trying desperately to keep his family together while shit goes down behind the scenes. I found his backstory revealed in the later missions really interesting, and his interactions with his past friends one of the best parts about him as they showed how difficult it is for him to move on from a life of crime.

Now, Trevor... is something alright. He is the last of the three characters to be introduced in story mode. You need to have played quite a few missions with the other two characters before he becomes a part of the story. As with everything in the GTA universe, his introduction mission was a chaotic mess, even more than others. Because of that, I thought I wouldn't like him as much as the others, that I was too attached to the other two characters. I was so wrong.
Trevor quickly ended up being my favorite of the three. To say that he is a lunatic would be a great understatement. But what hit me the most about him was how, despite being unquestionably the most violent of all the crew members, he valued loyalty and friendship the most.

His entire dispute with Michael is about how the latter betrayed the crew years ago, how he left without a word or trace, leaving his friends to either die or rot in prison. Trevor finds out that Michael is still alive and he feels cheated. Michael finds out that Trevor made it and he feels frantic. Worried that his psychopath of a friend will find out, will uncover the truth of his unexpected vanishing. As someone looking in from the outside, watching the two argue about their friendship in the pettiest of ways was such a blast.

My friends laughed when I told them that GTAV had a really engaging story, but had I not played it for myself, I would have missed out on one of the most entertaining games ever made.